


The Ghost of John

by Jaune_Chat



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Cover Art, Dark, Drug Use, M/M, Masturbation, Mental Health Issues, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-12-03 05:52:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/694891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jaune_Chat/pseuds/Jaune_Chat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The day John Watson died was when Sherlock started to fall in love with him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Ghost of John

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [journeystory](http://journeystory.livejournal.com). It takes place immediately after S1 of Sherlock (BBC). Art for this story done by nickygabriel - [Click here to see the icons and banner!](http://nickygabriel.livejournal.com/576497.html) Thanks to brighteyed_jill for betaing.
> 
> This story is super dark and angsty. You've been warned.

_John Watson is dead._

Sherlock’s injuries were not as severe as they could have been. The doctors had told him that over and over with a kind of wonder in their voices. The blast that should have shattered his bones and ripped his flesh apart had been borne by another. Sherlock has only fragmentary memories of the explosive detonation by the pool. He’d been forced to rely on Lestrade and Mycroft’s second-hand accounts of the event: intolerable. 

What they’d told him lacked the detail he needed, but until Scotland Yard stopped guarding his room so he couldn’t get out (that he was still physically incapable of same was beside the point), it was all he had to work with.

“John pushed you into the pool, Sherlock,” Lestrade had told him, in a moment of pain-filled wakefulness between drug-induced intervals of unconsciousness. “Put himself between you and the blast. Saved your life.”

Mycroft had cared little for Moriarty’s escape, nor for John’s suicidal heroism.

“You’d stopped breathing by the time those idiots had fished you out,” he’d said. “Broken leg and a concussion to boot. I brought in my own physician to take over your case.”

Sherlock had just lain there, staring at the ceiling, a posture of thought. But there was nothing in his mind. No thought. No clever plan. No brilliant deduction. Just the blessed kiss of morphine and a strangely aching emptiness whenever he realized John Watson was gone.

He’d made a single request, after they’d denied him going out. “Let me see him.”

Lestrade had been the one to tell him no. “There wasn’t much left, Sherlock,” he’d said plainly. 

“How do you know he’s dead, then?” Sherlock had demanded, anger making him give vent to a pointless query. Lestrade was marginally competent, and John’s medical records were extensive. Identifying the… pieces would be easy. 

“Dental records,” Lestrade said, confirming what Sherlock already know. “And his wounds from Afghanistan.”

Sherlock turned away, and realized he was strapped to the bed.

“You were fighting the nurses. And trying to sleepwalk,” Lestrade said gently.

Sherlock kept his face averted. “Moriarty.”

“Still at large. We’ve looked, Sherlock, and we’re still looking. His face is out to every transportation point from here to Hong Kong and beyond.”

Sherlock raised his eyes enough to see the insipidly inspirational calendar pinned to the wall. Two months had passed since Moriarty’s attack on him and John. Two months. He could have a whole new face, two dozen new plans. More. 

Lestrade waited patiently, but finally left. Sherlock pushed the morphine button until conscious thought stopped.

\----

Mycroft woke him a day later, his brisk instructions to the nurses including phrases of, “My brother has an addictive personality,” and “Past abuse problems.”

“Always looking after me,” Sherlock said in greeting, eyes still to the wall, once the room was clear of outsiders. 

Mycroft sniffed delicately. “James Moriarty is a pseudonym. There is no history attached to that name, other than a string of rumours, a bunch of ghost stories, whiffs of various crimes, and what he perpetrated on you.”

Sherlock remained silent.

“I’ve instructed the medical staff to administer your pain medication from now on.”

Nothing.

“John Watson’s funeral was over a month ago.”

Sherlock turned back to glare at Mycroft with eyes full of pain and hate and fire. Mycroft’s lips twitched in grim amusement.

“I’ll get my driver to take you to the pool.”

\-----

Sherlock would have refused the wheelchair, except his leg was not up for bearing weight for any length of time. He sulked as he was wheeled into the wreckage of the pool, and barely managed to pull himself to his feet. Mycroft had, of course, given him John’s cane to assist him.

Sherlock stared at the damage from the explosion, trampled and sifted and otherwise rearranged by police and forensics and firemen. Useless. All of it was useless.

Sherlock gritted his teeth. _He_ was useless. He was in a fog, able to think no more quickly than Lestrade on a bad day. He couldn’t focus. Above all, he couldn’t _remember._

He couldn’t remember how John had died.

“Sherlock?”

He turned, almost smiling in relief when John came walking across the floor to join him at the pool’s edge.

“You’re late. I texted you hours ago,” Sherlock said.

“Well, I _am_ dead,” John pointed out.

Sherlock’s look of disgust, that John _clearly_ should have found a way to answer him, made John smile.

“Feeling better already, I see,” John said.

“Marginally,” Sherlock allowed.

“That’s an improvement.”

“Over what?”

John hesitated a moment. “Mycroft didn’t let Lestrade tell you. Sherlock, you almost died too. Fractured skull. Brain swelling. It’s a wonder you woke up at all, let alone retained any higher brain function. They thought you’d be a vegetable, at best.”

Mycroft would not have brought in his physician to help Sherlock through a concussion, he realized. That realization made him cringe; he should have known that the minute Mycroft said it. “I don’t remember,” he said tersely, looking away at the blast point.

“Sherlock.” He turned to look at John. “You’re a marvel. If anyone could come out of this, you could.”

“Boring,” Sherlock said, hobbling a few steps for a better view.

“No, it’s not.” John paced him deliberately. “You just hate it when your body betrays you. You hate having to depend on anyone for anything.”

Sherlock looked away, not able to accept wisdom right now. “I can’t remember what happened after Moriarty returned.”

John nodded. “The snipers had us marked. Moriarty came back in. You were ready to shoot the explosives yourself. When you tightened your hand, I rushed you, took the gun, and knocked you into the pool. I shot the explosives myself.”

Spare words, but enough for Sherlock to close his eyes and remember. John’s shout, Moriarty diving for cover, the rush of water in his ears, and the pain and noise that had followed him down into unconsciousness. He opened his eyes again. John was still there, looking around the pool with resignation. 

“Moriarty would have been injured in that blast. But also likely he had an escape route, private physicians…” Sherlock mused.

“He wants to hurt you, Sherlock,” John said softly.

Sherlock turned as fast as his healing body would allow.

“He killed you, John!”

“Surely I’m not as important as all that.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Sherlock snapped.

“According to you, we all are,” John said.

“You’re the least incompetent person I know.”

“Knew.”

Sherlock suppressed an irrational desire to swat at John with his cane. “Don’t bother me with semantics.”

John sighed very quietly. “Don’t berate Harry when she comes by. I know she’ll be a few bottles down, no matter the day.”

“I have no intention of solving your murder, John,” Sherlock interrupted.

John drew himself up short, looking shocked.

“I already know who killed you, why, and how. Going to rub elbows with people who barely knew you, hoping Moriarty has bothered to drop breadcrumbs for me, while we weep over your photographs or tombstone holds no appeal.”

John hesitated, and swallowed hard. “So, you’re going to avenge me?”

“Moriarty will not stop until he sees me entirely ruined.”

“Why make it easy on him?” John said, blocking Sherlock’s way, a look of pained earnestness on his face.

Sherlock reached out, almost as if he could touch John again. “I know almost everything about you. I expect to correct that lack of knowledge before I confront Moriarty again.”

“Donovan warned me one day you’d go rogue.”

“Don’t be so dramatic. I simply have to be certain. And once he’s convinced I am ripe to be struck down…” Sherlock thumped his cane and grimaced.

“You’re losing your mind,” John said flatly.

“It’s mine to lose!” Sherlock shouted.

“Sir?” 

Sherlock turned to see the driver watching him anxiously. “The doctors say it’s time to come back now.”

Sherlock was about to give the fool a scathing dressing-down for interrupting, but a look over his shoulder showed that John was gone. The fight went out of him in an instant. The driver barely got the wheelchair under Sherlock in time.

\-----

Sherlock had finally managed to look at his own medical records. He’d feigned such utter docility that a soft-hearted nurse had both neglected to take them out with her (undoubtedly Mycroft’s standing orders) or to tighten his restraints properly after letting him up for necessities. Sherlock was quick, but even so he devoured the records with a kind of sick fascination. John’s explanation of his injury had been the simplest version. The file contained colour photographs, X-rays, a CAT scan, as well as extensive doctor’s notes. 

Sherlock scanned them quickly, picking up key words. Fractured skull, respiration stopped for five minutes, heart stopped three times, died twice during surgery, compound tib-fib fracture of his lower right leg. Brain swelling, significant chance of major brain damage. Six weeks in a coma.

“They were surprised you woke up at all, let alone in any state to ask questions,” John pointed out from his seat at Sherlock’s bedside. Sherlock didn’t question how long he’d been there. 

“I’m… damaged,” Sherlock said slowly. John nodded. “I can’t be, not now.”

John looked at the doorway, and Sherlock followed his gaze. Mycroft was standing there, a visible expression of worry on his face.

“I’m a dead man walking, according to your pet physician,” Sherlock said.

Mycroft nodded curtly. “Moriarty has vanished. Left a city full of chaos in his wake and just vanished.”

“I know how you hate loose ends.”

“I should get someone to restrain you again.”

“I won’t tolerate this, Mycroft. Let me go. I’ll take care of the loose ends.”

Mycroft might be an interfering busybody bureaucrat, but he was not without some intellectual merit. “And let you use yourself as bait? I’ll not have you burning yourself out just for the sake of catching this madman.”

“You will never have me in your service. And I am not doing this for Moriarty’s sake or my own.”

Mycroft paused and looked at his brother keenly, coming to a conclusion that left him both proud and saddened. “That it should take this for you to find your compassion-.”

“Will you call off your dogs and stop interfering?” Sherlock snapped. Mycroft’s flunkies were lurking outside his door day and night, and his trip to the pool had been the only sanctioned outing.

Mycroft nodded curtly. “He was the best thing that ever happened to you.”

He didn’t mean Moriarty. Sherlock smiled thinly. “I will not be kind to anyone, myself included.”

“I wouldn’t have dreamed otherwise.” 

\-----

For a month afterward, Sherlock endured the dull routine of healing with a stoic resignation that had Mycroft worried almost to the point of paranoia. Some marginally normal part of Sherlock’s brain noted that and filed it away for future reference as a way to make Mycroft squirm. 

The other visitors, however, ran the gamut from worried to hopeful. Mycroft was as invariable as gravity, hiding his worry behind his usual façade of utter respectability. Lestrade continued his visits, mostly out of a woefully misplaced feeling of guilt, by Sherlock’s estimation. Mrs. Hudson came, bearing enough food to stuff him like a goose and tea enough to drown him. She wouldn’t even talk about John, daubing at her eyes as she fussily arranged the food on Sherlock’s tray and then dashing out again before he’d even lifted a hand.

“You should ask her to bring your violin,” John commented, as the sound of Mrs. Hudson’s footsteps faded down the hallway.

“Don’t be absurd. She’d damage it on the way across town.”

“You put it back in its case before the last adventure started. You didn’t need it to concentrate once Moriarty started dropping bodies.”

Sherlock turned to glare at John.

“It’s true,” John said quietly.

Sherlock looked away.

“You’re going to need it. Harry found out which hospital you’re at.” John looked only faintly sympathetic as he delivered that news.

“Bollocks.”

“Don’t be cruel, Sherlock.”

“I very much doubt she would observe the same courtesy.”

“Since when did you care about courtesy?” John raised an eyebrow.

“Generally, I do not. However, she will be incredibly irrational, and I do not have the time or inclination to placate your sister’s anger.”

“If you haven’t noticed, you’re confined to a hospital bed.”

“I was able to get up to see--.”

“My death scene, I know. I also know that you would have gotten out of bed and _crawled_ there if you had to, and so did Mycroft. That’s why he let you out.” John leaned over Sherlock, concern in every careworn line of him. “You can be more than this, Sherlock.” His hand hovered over Sherlock’s leg, then almost brushed over his head.

“I do not count my injuries as myself!” Sherlock snapped.

“You’ve never been seriously hurt before, traumatized before. You don’t know what it does to you.”

“Please, how many times did we face the possibility of serious injury together?”

John turned away, a shadow of pain passing over his face.

“The only time I ever saw you in pain was when Moriarty had me strapped to a bomb.”

The shock of that statement washed over Sherlock like a spray of freezing rain. “I am not like you, John.”

“What, you won’t develop some psychosomatic symptom because something actually penetrated that outward calm for once?”

“Because it was just the side of the pool!” _Not your death. I can still function even if you’re dead. I can still correct the fact that Jim Moriarty is still breathing._

“Sherlock?”

John had vanished again, and Sherlock turned to see the wretchedly unwelcome forms of Anderson and Donovan standing together in the doorway, exchanging whispered comments. From the still-professional clothing and the shamefaced and uncomfortable expressions, someone had forced them into coming to see him. The others at Scotland Yard? Possibly. They must have a wider sadistic streak than Sherlock had thought. Or Lestrade had ordered them to come. Yes, far more likely, and that put an interesting wrinkle into Lestrade’s personality.

Of course the two were looking as if they wanted to call the nurse and have him sedated. To be fair, both often looked at him that way.

Sally’s mouth twisted as she attempted to force a civil greeting from her lips, and Sherlock quickly intervened, blood still running hot from fighting with John.

_John Watson is dead._

“Don’t be tedious. If you attempt to be contrite you’ll become even more irritating than you already are.”

Donovan’s head came up in shock, and her expression darkened to one Sherlock was more familiar with.

“Not even getting your head broken shuts you up, does it, freak?” she asked acidly.

“Not even remotely. Did Lestrade send you on a misplaced mission of pity or did you come by simply to see how I looked while incapacitated? The first, of course, neither of you would subject yourself to my company unless compelled.” The rapid-fire observation, the way the words rolled out of Sherlock’s mouth, gave him a much-needed feeling of normalcy. The shock on Anderson and Donovan’s faces was only to be expected.

“He told us to show you the crime scene photos,” Anderson said, his mouth puckered with distaste. “See if you could make anything of them.” He took a step into the room, tossed the folder at the foot of the bed, and stepped back. “I’m sure you have his number.”

“Hope you’re damn proud of yourself,” Donovan said, a dark twist to her voice.

Both retreated far faster than they had come, and in moments Sherlock was alone again. He turned, expecting to see John, only to confront a blank expanse of wall. Leaning forward gingerly, only now feeling the pain in his head, he plucked the folder from his cover and opened it up.

Carnage and body parts were splattered across the first picture.

Sherlock slammed the folder shut and shoved it under his mattress, hands shaking from an adrenaline rush of emotions he couldn’t name.

This was evidence, data. He had to look at it, process it, find something from it. He hadn’t _been there_ when it had happened, hadn’t been conscious, so surely Scotland Yard had missed something, some vital clue he could use to locate Moriarty. He needed to look at it.

Just not now.

\-----

“You bastard.”

There was the sour stench of whiskey in the room, poisoning the air.

“Had to take him, didn’t you?”

Female voice, low, rough with emotion, screaming, words slurred. Drunk. Harriet Watson.

“Survived a fuck- fucking _war_ and gets _blown up_ here!”

Sherlock didn’t want to open his eyes. What time was it? Late, sounds in the hallway too quiet. Not normal visiting hours. The nurse would be in soon to remove her.

“Took him away!” Harry screamed. “Bastard!”

Too close, the blow caught Sherlock by surprise, pain blooming in his chest as she hammered him with her fists. He tried to bring his hands up to defend himself and was brought up short by the handcuffs. He opened his eyes and she jumped back two feet, nearly stumbling.

“You killed him.” Her finger stabbed the air, wavering in his direction. “Killed him. Shouldn’t be you here. Should’ve buried you! You-.” Her mouth worked as she tried to find words through the fuzz of rage and alcohol. “You. Not him, you.”

The door opened, the nurse and two burly orderlies crowding the small space, closing their hands upon her, dragging her away.

“Should’ve been you!” Harriet shrieked, as the apologetic nurse closed the door. She tried to examine Sherlock, her questions breaking through his unwavering contemplation of Harriet Watson’s words.

“Did she hurt you? Sir?”

There was a pause, long enough that the nurse double-checked the machines monitoring Sherlock’s vital functions, just to be certain he was alive.

His head ached, his leg still throbbed distantly, he was seeing double, and his chest and ribs felt half-crushed. He was having difficulty getting a full breath.

“No. She did not.”

The nurse hesitated, but finally left him alone.

Sherlock turned his face back towards the wall.

\-----

The first day out of the hospital was utterly humiliating. Mycroft insisted on taking Sherlock back to his flat personally, and only extreme stubbornness had convinced him to take Sherlock back to his sanctuary rather than bundle him back to the family estate.

“You will put up with anything from me, Mycroft, but the servants won’t. Take me back to Baker Street or I doubt you will be able to employ any domestics for a year.”

Mycroft had taken the threat seriously, and grimly directed his assistant (“Anthea” was what she was using now) to do as he said. Sherlock had realized too late his pride had almost undone him. His leg genuinely protested every movement from the hospital doors to the car, hurting far worse now than it had when he’d visited the pool. This was no psychosomatic injury, but a genuine remodelling of muscle and bone. It _hurt_. The pain was real, and a too-pointed reminder of John’s absence. It should have been him limping slightly at Sherlock’s side. He should have been there, flirting with Anthea, getting shot down by Anthea, and then telling Sherlock to slow down before he hurt himself again as they pulled up to the flat.

But John was only there when he felt like it. Sherlock hadn’t seen him since before Harry had unloaded two months of guilt onto him. The ache in his chest from where she’d struck him was mostly gone now.

Sherlock ignored the pain as he climbed out of the car and mounted the steps. Every stair was agony to his healing flesh, and his vision had tunnelled by the time he’d reached the sitting room. Only then did he realize Mrs. Hudson was fluttering next to him, alternately trying to steady him and daubing at her eyes with a handkerchief. More of Mycroft’s flunkies tromped up after him, depositing his clothing and belongings on the sofa. A surprising amount of cards lay on top of the pile, well-wishing cards from the hospital. A flash of something like anger fired through Sherlock’s brain when he realized that virtually all of them were condolences on the loss of John. The writers hadn’t cared that Moriarty had escaped or John had been some variety of hero or Sherlock had nearly died. Only that John Watson wasn’t-.

“You can leave,” Sherlock snapped. Anthea appeared out of the flock of retreating suits, and put a cheque atop the table. Despite not looking up from her phone, she didn’t miss a step. She was waiting for Sherlock’s usual response, his vehement denial of Mycroft’s money. Sherlock looked at the amount, and then looked into the kitchen. His laboratory equipment was still scattered on the table, and John’s tea cup was still next to the sink. Sherlock saw red for a moment, but John just glared at him from beside the fireplace, as if daring him to have an outburst. 

He’d returned. Sherlock felt a strange elation warring with the rage inside of him, and could feel the blood rushing to his cheeks, colouring them bright pink as the emotions gripped him with surprising strength.

“Don’t be an idiot, for once in your life Sherlock. Don’t take it out on her.”

“I can’t work like this.”

Anthea looked up briefly as John said, “You could work through the end of the world.”

“I already have,” Sherlock said tersely.

“Hmm?” Anthea prompted.

“Pay in the cheque. I’m certain Mycroft knows where my accounts are.”

Anthea stopped texting for fifteen seconds, then resumed at a furious rate after she took the cheque back. She turned and left without another word.

“Sherlock?” Mrs. Hudson’s voice intruded, and he flinched back from her supportive grip. “I’ll make you a cuppa,” she said, retreating to the familiar ritual of kettle and cup.

Sherlock closed his eyes and waited until she had gone downstairs. Then he limped heavily to the stairs to John’s room. John waited for him at the landing, arms crossed.

“What is it now?” Sherlock demanded, frustration making him cross.

“One, you’re going to need those painkillers you keep refusing if you insist on trying to climb stairs. And two, you’re not going to like what you find.”

“Mycroft has forbidden the hospital to give me effective pain drugs, so it’s pointless to take those pathetic excuses for pills they’ve given me. And it’s your room. Why wouldn’t I care for what I find?” Why wouldn’t he want to see the one untouched place where traces of John still remained?

“Sherlock, it’s been three months.” 

Sherlock brushed past him and opened the door.

Bed, neat, but bare. Dresser, bureau, nightstand, desk, chair, efficiently arranged. Empty. No clothing, no pictures, no dog tags, no books, no loose change, no hideous little knickknacks, nothing.

_Three months_

“Harry,” Sherlock stated.

“She’s my only relative, Sherlock.”

“She came in here, took…” Anger, unreasoning and frighteningly freeing, swept him.

“Don’t-,” John began, a warning look on his face, mixed with a hint of trepidation and fear.

“Mrs. Hudson let her in,” Sherlock growled. 

“Harry practically bowled the old dear over. She was feeling guilty, blaming you-.”

“I was there when she came into my hospital room, John. I may have been half-asleep, but I do remember that rather rambling drunken condemnation of my very existence.”

John did not look nearly as angry as Sherlock would have expected. “Then don’t blame her for this, don’t-.”

“What, get angry? I _am_ angry, John, properly angry, possibly for the first time in my life. I want to _hurt_ her!” he snarled.

“Come off it,” John said flatly.

Sherlock banged the cane against the door. “I am not in the mood to be reasonable!”

“Sherlock, dear?” Mrs. Hudson’s plaintive voice drifted up the stairs.

Sherlock looked around the room, finding virtually nothing there of John. John was gone.

If he repeated that irrefutable fact often enough, it just might make it true.

He did not want to make it true.

John had vanished from his place by the door and Sherlock could feel a hollow emptiness under his sternum.

_Illogical, pointless, psychosomatic emotional feedback, dear God he wanted to feel normal again._

Staggering, he limped back down the stairs. He lowered himself down in the chair John had favoured, took the cup Mrs. Hudson pressed on him, and let her fuss over him for a moment or two. When he didn’t respond, not even to snap at her, she all but dropped a plate of biscuits by his elbow and fled downstairs.

Sherlock ate them, drank the tea, and stared into the growing gloom of the flat, feeling empty of anger or joy. Waited. Wanted for stimulation. Needed to think. Couldn’t.

“John?”

He wasn’t there.

Sherlock stayed awake until the following dawn. He read John’s blogs over and over again, comparing them to his own entries, and shook his head over John’s hapless layman’s view of the world. It was the last personal thing he had left, with John’s possessions gone and Sherlock’s own mind unreliable.

At one juncture he recognized his behaviour as dangerously obsessive. He kept reading anyway.

It wasn’t until the second dawn when he realized John was sitting next to him.

“Where have you been?” Sherlock demanded. 

“I don’t run on a schedule anymore, Sherlock.”

“You left me alone.”

John caught the fine distinction in Sherlock’s tone. “Well, Mrs. Hudson was hardly going to appreciate you ranting to your dead flatmate.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Sherlock said.

“Colleague, then,” John corrected himself.

“Friend, John. I had hoped we were there, at least.”

“I killed for you, Sherlock. I hoped you had figured out I don’t do that for a lark.”

“No. I-.”

John cut him off decisively. “Why did you take Mycroft’s money?”

Sherlock was silent for a long while, but John was patient. “I am going to find Moriarty. And I cannot concentrate on him when I have idiots nagging at me for payment!”

“So, it’s purely for practical reasons,” John said, raising an eyebrow.

Sherlock’s expression darkened. “You know better than that, John. I intend to squeeze Mycroft for every last coin. He’s wanted to get me on his payroll since he began even considering the possibility of working for the government. It would be quite a coup to have me tamed and placed in Her Majesty’s service. It’s time he realized I was sparing not just myself from boredom but his precious reputation refusing all these years.”

“You’re going to do something horrible, aren’t you?”

“Don’t belabour the obvious, John. Something horrible is the only way to get Moriarty’s attention.”

“You were starting to be good,” John said softly. “Sherlock, truly.”

Sherlock felt something like pain in his chest when John’s expression turned disapproving.

_I’m not well, I’m not right, I’m not thinking correctly. No. John’s opinion matters._

Sherlock knew that John’s limited mind could comprehend the inexplicable world with all its mundane considerations, freeing Sherlock from having to do so. And yet John was not intimidated by Sherlock’s formidable intellect. His opinion mattered because he had an understanding of Sherlock on a level that defied logic.

That was useful on a case, when he had to soothe tempers ruffled by Sherlock cutting to the heart of the facts, but why did his opinion of Sherlock on a personal level cause him pain? It made no sense. No sense at all.

“Why should I ‘be good?’ You aren’t here to appreciate it. I have other things to do than conform to some arbitrary moral and ethical standard.”

“Because Moriarty wants to kill you.” John moved, his hand hovering above where Sherlock’s heart was thumping in his chest. “He wants to kill everything about you. Fight this, Sherlock. Please!”

Sherlock closed his eyes, the pain in his chest growing, expanding, then collapsing as he curled in on himself on the sofa.

John Watson was dead. And there was nothing he could do to change it.

He laid there for an hour, at first thinking of nothing, then dragging forth every relevant fact about Moriarty from the depths of his mind. The paltry sum of facts was dishearteningly small.

Heartbreakingly inadequate.

_There was no significant damage to my chest._

He knew there had been more information. But his mind refused to bring facts to light. 

When he pressed his fingers through his hair, he could feel the faint ridge where his skull had knitted itself back together. His brain, the organ he’d spent all his time and effort and energy loading with useful information and processes had been violated. Pieces had died. Information was gone. Processes had been truncated.

He wondered if Moriarty found him to be a less-than-suitable rival now that he was less.

“You’re not less.” John’s voice was soft as rain.

Sherlock looked up irritably into John’s concerned expression. “I am slow. I don’t remember.”

“That does not make you less.”

“What does it make me, then?”

“Different.”

Sherlock nearly snarled at the word. "I have been so all my life, child to man, scorned or boxed or placed on a pedestal, shown as an example. Look: Different.”

John stood slowly, the flex of his leg and stretch of his shoulder reminding Sherlock of what laid ( _had lain_ ) beneath his jumper and trousers. The starburst wound, the phantom pain, things that had shattered him, nearly killed him. Yet he had found strength beyond the change. The sentiment, Sherlock recognized, was plebeian. However, it did not follow that it was false. 

These were simple facts of the human condition – but simple did not mean easy. The simplest things rarely were easy. Sherlock would never say he had taken the easy road, but he had deliberately avoided the simple. 

“How long will you stay?”

The simplicity of that statement shocked him, frightened him. The idea of calling John out, of probing the reason John was speaking to him when he was so very clearly dead, terrified him beyond measure. But any sane, rational human being would want to know. 

Despite popular theory, it was possible for Sherlock Holmes to be capable of sane, rational acts. He merely usually swept through them so fast no one noticed.

“I’ll be here as long as you need me.”

Sherlock hadn’t realized how tense he’d been until he involuntarily relaxed into the cushions of the sofa. He hadn’t realized how badly he’d needed to hear those exact words.

“That may be forever,” he said.

“You’ll know when,” John said.

“You’re being maddeningly obtuse.”

“This is how the rest of us feel when you talk.”

Stillness overtook Sherlock and John’s expression softened. “It’s true.”

“I wasn’t ready for you to go,” Sherlock whispered. He could feel the simple truth in that statement.

John smiled. “Nor was I.”

A moment of silence passed, breathing in the dark, the lonely bellows of an empty room. Sherlock’s skull ached for a single instant as he looked up at John and realized something momentous. “I missed something. How could I have been so stupid?”

“Not enough room on the hard drive?” John’s flippant comment belied the seriousness of his voice.

“No. There was nothing there I wouldn’t have sacrificed to have known this while you were alive. Not a single fact I’ve learned, not my mother’s praise, not my own name.”

“Then you already know.”

“No, not yet.” Silence, stretching out into agony. “Teach me?”

A smile, beautiful and heartfelt, from the ghost of John. “Gladly.” 

Sherlock could feel something stirring within him, something struggling to be known beneath the rush of giddiness.

_John Watson is dead._

A moment later, a second thought surfaced.

_Jim Moriarty will die._

Sherlock closed his eyes, and then opened them to focus on John.

\-------

Night, nearly a week later, had found them in Sherlock’s room, drawn there by the comfort of one place of inviolate sanctity, one place where John had never been. One place where new memories could be made without old ones intruding. A place where Sherlock felt safe enough to embark upon a new discovery.

“Most of us go through life having learned this as teenagers,” John was saying.

“I-.”

“You are not most people, I know.”

Park of Sherlock knew what to say. He could easily fake his way through romance as he could any other human condition. He knew what flirtation looked like, how the voice would rise with enthusiasm, the cheeks would blush, the stammering comments of awkward words and tooth-rottingly sweet sincerity. He knew that role as well as any other in his vast repertoire. It was easy to fake. 

The prospect of not faking it, of allowing emotion to flood him, was as standing upon a cliff above murky water. He could dive cleanly, but once he entered he water, there could be anything underneath. He would be at the mercy of the environment.

And yet… he had allowed anger to use him before, had let the strength of rage give him what he needed to chart a new course. Surely all the illogical acts connected to affection and love must have a basis. He had observed that people would overcome (or attempt to overcome) ludicrous obstacles for the chance of being with the object of their affection. Death was no great obstacle, not for some.

“I don’t believe I am the dating type,” Sherlock said.

“Considering that at most of the places you took me to, either one or both of us ended up running or fighting for our lives, I’m relieved.” John smiled, and Sherlock felt a smile in return. It didn’t displease him that it was more than just shared experiences or even simple mutual liking. It was shared passion, connection. It was possible, so possible, to feel something he’d only observed in the abstract.

And it was so very possible to want to. To let himself lose control.

Yes, he could do this. Because it was John. And above all else, he could trust him.

Sherlock reached out to touch, and then stopped himself before his fingers could make contact. 

“It’s all right,” John urged softly. 

“You’re dead,” Sherlock whispered.

“ _You’re_ not. Go on.”

Sherlock stared at the ceiling of his room for only a moment before dragging his attention down to himself. He’d divested himself of clothing, the light from the lamp revealing the hollows of his hips, the lines of his musculature, the lay of his bones and joints on the bed. He breathed slowly, regularly, waiting to see how his skin reacted, how he flushed or paled as he let oxygen suffuse his tissues evenly. The scars on his leg were fading, the shape of the tibia and fibula nearly regular, aside from the bone callus. The muscle was almost back to its previous state, flexible and taut, no longer withered or spasming or swollen. The smaller scars from various other shrapnel had faded, and the headaches were mostly gone.

The painkilling drugs that had been given to him (a very limited supply, thanks to Mycroft’s timely intervention and brotherly advice) were long gone, and any lingering pain was his own to deal with. And yet despite that, Sherlock felt a minor flush of success. He was uncertain of his own state of mind, but his body, at least, he had managed to whip back into shape.

John had despaired at Sherlock’s refusal to eat at times, or the days without sleep, or spent sulking on the couch, but that was only the smallest part of it. Sherlock knew what his body could take, how to keep it nimble and strong. He would not go running across London unless he had the breath and legs for it. He wouldn’t subject himself to the death threats of rough characters unless he knew he had the reflexes and strength to fend off attacks. That strength and breath he’d managed to regain, and far ahead of the ridiculously restrictive schedule Mycroft’s physio had in mind. 

But other considerations aside from simple health had to be put to the test.

It was just something he’d never really had need to test before. A test of the hollow feeling that would not dissipate, a common enough solution for the psychosomatic feeling in his chest. 

“Why are you afraid?”

Sherlock turned his head slowly to see John sitting there, draped only in a loose robe, one hand carelessly draped over a thigh. He’d wanted to see Sherlock whole again, healthy. A mutual desire, as it turned out. The part of Sherlock that had been learning from John for the past few days welcomed his presence, so very close to him.

“Not afraid. Uncertain,” Sherlock clarified. He raised his hand and ran the tips of his fingers down the centre of his sternum, lightly. The skin there tingled in the aftermath of his touch, and Sherlock shivered slightly at the pleasant sensations it created.

John nodded slightly and leaned forward, voice hitching as he spoke. “I thought you didn’t do…” he gestured vaguely as Sherlock repeated the motion, this time scratching lightly. “Well, physical… gratification.”

“You think this is what this is?”

“You’re lying naked on your bed touching yourself, so forgive me from rushing to a conclusion,” John said with inescapable logic.

“I want to be certain I haven’t lost any sensitivity,” Sherlock said. “I’ve been in recovery for a while.” He couldn’t yet speak everything he wanted out loud, and covered the mire of emotion with the hard planks of logic. He moved his hand a few inches to the left, this time brushing the skin of his nipple, and gasped as a shock of pleasure shot through him. Something like fear did grip him, and John was there at the bedside, hovering over him.

“You never have done this, have you?”

“Don’t be absurd, of course I have,” Sherlock said, repeating the gesture, trying to keep his voice steady as his body shivered and responded to the touch of his own hands. At least, that was only part of the logical explanation. John looming over him, looking into his eyes with concern, was provoking a physical response beyond the norm.

 _Yes._

John’s expression begged for an explanation, and Sherlock obliged, slowing down his hands gratefully.

“All the boys at school spoke of various acts witnessed in magazines or movies. And sexual education, of course, gave the fundamentals. My classmates were obsessed with women, girls, and sex acts. I naturally experimented with as much as I was able to determine the reason for the obsession.”

Sherlock closed his eyes, recalling seeing the centrefold model, naked and reclining on a bed. Sneaking in to see movies of men and women having intercourse. Wondering why his classmates spoke of it incessantly. Stroking himself idly, coming indifferently, unable to see why such a state of arousal was so desired.

“Experimented,” John said, shaking his head.

“It was pleasurable, yes, ultimately not interesting as other things. I attempted a variety techniques, simply to see if I was being inappropriately stimulated, but there was nothing I encountered that gave me any reason to divert a moment from my own experiments purely to gratify myself. I assumed nothing ever would. I hardly desired such a state. It was entirely messy and unnecessary when compared with my work.”

“Says the man who keeps human heads in the refrigerator and eyes in the microwave.” John smiled indulgently. Sherlock moved his other hand and stroked both down his chest at once. The resulting shock sparked right to his groin, and he felt his erection stirring.

“Why now, then, Sherlock?”

Sherlock looked up at him, his fingers running idly up and down his chest. “I have had little to think about in three months but you. And you are no longer here.”

John looked a little stunned, as if he hadn’t quite comprehended that all of Sherlock’s formidable brainpower had been devoted to him. “This helps you think of me?” he asked, barely breathing.

Sherlock shook his head. “It’s the last pain I have. There are ways to fool the body to creating its own painkillers. Endorphins-.”

John suddenly leaned over him, and Sherlock shut his mouth. “I’ll help you. All you ever had to say was that you needed me.”

Something cracked within him, like lightning across his skull, down his spine, suddenly filling that hollow void inside him. “Yes.”

“Look down at yourself. You’re going to like this. It’s natural, Sherlock.” There was more than a simple soothing doctor’s tone in John’s voice, a hint of the coaxing tone that one might use with a skittish animal. And along with that, eager, breathless anticipation. John _wanted_ this as much as Sherlock did.

“Touch yourself again. Pinch, lightly.”

Another shock, and Sherlock swelled, thicker, longer. 

“Harder.”

Pain-pleasure mix, but good, very good. The shock curled Sherlock’s toes, and he braced his feet on the bed.

“Again. Run your hands down your stomach. Feel yourself breathing? The pulse there? One hand down your thigh. Feel the heat from your cock?”

The commands drifted into Sherlock’s ear, and he felt the hollow pain recede to nothing. Yes, this was what was needed. A physical distraction from a psychological abnormality.

A flicker of coldness ran through him at the spare and logical statement. He looked at John, his smiling open, face flushed with arousal and satisfaction, and warmth suffused him again. 

_More than distraction_.

“Wrap your hand around it. Squeeze a bit. Feel that? Pinch again- ah, you felt yourself jump, didn’t you?”

His body didn’t feel quite his own, his hands moving at John’s command, drawing responses out of himself that he didn’t know how to analyse. His cock jumped as a bolt of pleasure spiked through him, marvellously obliterating any hint of pain.

“John, more!”

John’s commands became like Sherlock’s thoughts, playing his body like an instrument, wringing new sensations out of him until he gasped into the darkness of his room, sated and solid. 

After a few moments, when Sherlock was still surfacing from being submerged in pleasure, John whispered to him, “You’ll be all right Sherlock. I promise you, you’re going to be all right.”

When Sherlock could open his eyes again, John was gone. 

\-----

“If you hadn’t nearly died, would have tried to talk to me?”

The thin, grey light of morning silvered the sheets, making everything blur and fade. John’s voice warmed the quiet room, the only spot of sunshine. Sherlock was instantly awake and alert.

At one point Sherlock would have answered flippantly, scathing John for failing to specify what kind of “talk” he wanted to hear, deliberately not understanding unsaid social conventions in the hopes of probing John’s motives. Now he felt stripped of the shield of wit, not for the reason of injury, but rather honesty. The dead did not lie, only the living. He owed John absolute truth.

“Possibly.” His own voice seemed as thin as the morning light. “I viewed death as a remote possibility. There was no urgency, as I believed you would live.”

“All the times you nearly got yourself killed…” John muttered.

“And you came with me,” Sherlock pointed out, turning to see John silhouetted by the window.

John looked for a moment as if he would protest, and then shook his head. “We were enough of a terror as it was. Us together might have driven those around us to extremes.”

“I believe, now, it would have been worth the weakness.”

“Love is not weak.” John’s voice was low, but solid, like granite underfoot.

Sherlock heard his own voice as water, the inexorable eroding force. “Moriarty destroyed you because you were at my side. If not for me, you would have lived.”

“I’d have been the poorer for it.”

The lyrics of insipid radio songs suddenly intruded into Sherlock’s memories. “Better to feast for one day than to starve for years?” he asked. The sentiment was strange in his ears.

“Yes, you wouldn’t have regretted losing me if you’d never met me.”

Sherlock paused and finally nodded. He had risked himself countless times on London’s streets, gambling with his body, health, and sanity for the rush of discovery and the thrill of outwitting another human mind. If he had risked John, risked acknowledging sentiment openly…

Insipid the sentiment might be, but it did not follow that it was incorrect.

Sherlock closed his eyes and reviewed his mental map of London. Assuming _that_ hadn’t been damaged as well, he knew exactly where the nearest church was. Wasn’t that was people did, go to a church when they needed advice in such intangible, possibly fanciful notions of the soul, sin, and the afterlife? Was there any advice a vicar could give that would help him understand the new aching, tender feeling in his chest? Anything a stranger could say that would help him understand the irrefutable fact that John Watson was dead, would remain so, and Sherlock Holmes was part of the cause?

Yet he didn’t want a stranger’s opinion. It was simply unfair that John should have to waste his time trying to drag Sherlock into a realm of common understanding. He’d wanted to be taught, but not to bore John-.

“You could never be boring.”

“If not boring, then hopelessly ignorant.” Sherlock knew Lestrade would have given his right arm for such an admission from him. That was why such things were for John’s ears only. He did not scorn for John to hear them.

John shook his head, smiling ruefully. “You’d think being dead would give you answers on how to deal with everything. It doesn’t. I’m just trying, Sherlock.” 

\-----

Later that day, Sherlock had retreated to the front room, carefully sorting through the folders he was certain Lestrade was leaving on his desk. On top was the one from John’s murder. He stared at the front of the folder for a very long time, long enough for John to have sat down beside him, concern deepening the lines in his face. At length, Sherlock put John’s folder at the bottom of the pile.

“I don’t have any pressing reason to stay, John,” Sherlock said softly.

“Your work?” John asked, his expression grave.

“Don’t be absurd. I am excellent at my work. There are none better at what I do. But Lestrade’s band of merry men and women has some capabilities of their own. A dozen of them together should be able to serve. Once Moriarty is gone, the rest of organization will be within their purview, given some diligence and my own peerless example as a model.”

John grinned broadly despite the seriousness of the discussion.

“Hmm, I expected a different answer from you,” Sherlock said.

“What?”

Sherlock waved his hand dismissively, and his voice took on an exaggerated, mocking tone. “‘No, Sherlock, you have to live, I love you, you have to live for me you arrogant bastard.’”

“The only way to dissuade you is with superior logic. And there is no logic to be had here.” John shook his head. “I can’t argue with you about this.”

“Don’t you want me to live?” Sherlock raised an eyebrow at his acceptance.

“I want you to be happy and be loved. You won’t believe you can be either until you do this.” John leaned down, filling Sherlock’s field of vision. “Moriarty doesn’t deserve anything but death, as clean as you can make it.”

Sherlock took a deep breath. “He won’t come to me unless he believes he has won. He must see me suffer, fail.”

“But-.”

“This will be simple, if not easy. He must know what’s going on. He’ll need to gloat. In that, he’s just like me.” 

“But in no other way. Remember that.” John’s words had a finality about them, an absoluteness that Sherlock treasured.

There was a long silence, companionable and heavy, with Sherlock’s breath the only sound in the room. 

“I must work, John. I have to mark his network for Lestrade, for when I’m done.”

Another silence, John staring at him with an indefinable expression.

“John, why did you come back for me?”

“I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. I wanted that.”

Sherlock raised an eyebrow. “You spent the last several years dodging bullets, bombs, and people who wanted to kill you-.”

“Only to come back to London and throw myself into doing the same thing again-.”

“So when did you ever think that a lingering goodbye was going to happen?”

John shrugged. “Optimism.”

“That, I’m afraid, is not part of my repertoire.”

“But revenge is?”

Sherlock held himself very still, and knew his eyes had just gone cold. “I do not forgive, nor forget the reasons you’re gone.”

“I know why you want him dead, I would too, but why go after him this way?” John asked.

“You did things for other people. I never did, before I met you,” Sherlock said softly.

“Sherlock, you _solved crimes_.”

“For gratis, because it amused me. You had reasons other than ego. This won’t be my last great trick, or some clever game.” Never had Sherlock wanted to touch John so badly, to grasp his hand, to emphasize his point, to press understanding through his skin. But he couldn’t. He never could. Jim Moriarty had taken that from him, taken every possibility of that away. “This… I wish to be worth your sacrifice. This is my gift to you.”

John’s mouth opened his shock. “I-. Sherlock, I-.”

“If I were to spend the rest of my life without you, I will messily go mad. I will do this for you, but I will not wait to join you. I am not patient.” Sherlock moved to the desk and opened a drawer. Under a cunningly hidden false bottom was the leather Morocco case.

“No. I’ll leave.” John’s voice had turned desperate.

“I do not have time to tease my brain into working again, John.”

“Please, no.”

“I will not wait.”

“Sherlock.”

“James Moriarty is going to die by my hand. But I have to make him believe in my destruction.”

“I won’t stay. Sherlock, you can’t keep this crammed inside you. For God’s sake, let some of this go, please!”

“As you will. I will find you. Let me burn, John. I must send up a pyre for him to see.”

When Sherlock turned around, John was gone.

\-----

On the desk were the case files Lestrade had been leaving in his flat for a week. Possible traces of Moriarty: linked crimes, clever schemes, similar deaths, the flotsam and jetsam of the criminal world. They needed to be sifted, sorted, probed, and dragged into some semblance of coherency.

Sherlock had stared at them, uncomprehendingly, for hours in between John talking to him. He knew there was vital information there, things he needed to find.

He was so _slow_. Damnably slow. His reasoning had regressed to the point of even Anderson being able to follow along. His insights still had some value to Lestrade, but the brilliant leaps that had made him the (loathed, detested, barely tolerated) toast of Scotland Yard were lacking. 

He was not doing well. Not doing _good_. Unable to attract Moriarty’s attention one way or the other. And John had made good on his threat.

 _John had said good-bye, John had said he needed to learn to live with his memory. Unacceptable. Sherlock had just not been doing enough,_ been _enough._

His mind had betrayed him. He hadn’t been clever enough to anticipate Moriarty’s final plan, nor insightful enough to deduce anything from what evidence had been left behind. There was little enough in his head to help his quest. So let his body follow his mind. Let every vice reign. Perhaps in the fullness of decadence he could discover some insight that pure intellect could not.

There were ways to use that decadence. Ways he’d thought he needed when he was less confident in the power of his mind, less educated in the ways of the human body, less experienced in the realm of crime. But there were ways to make the connections Moriarty had taken from him by nearly cracking his head open in an explosion.

The leather Morocco case in the desk drawer was precisely where he’d left it three years ago. The needle inside was still sharp. The small bottle of prepared solution was ready for him. 

The ritual came back clearly, the tourniquet around his arm, probing for a vein, the plunge, the push.

The rush. Dear God, the rush. Opening him everything in his body and mind like fireworks, spreading out with warmth and the thunderous cascade of thought. For a moment, there was normalcy inside his own body. The drug sizzled and burned, lighting him up from head to foot, establishing connections long-since dormant. Facts sparkled bright and clear, showing him the way. That the way was bright and pitiless, with hard shadows along its edges, he couldn’t be bothered with right now. He rushed through the files, mind leaping across chasms of doubt to plateaus of utter certainty, gathering the answers as greedily as a child would gather sweets. 

Feverishly, Sherlock grabbed the case files and a pen and began making copious notes.

\-----

He knew how to spread the word of his apparent downward spiral. How to send up a smoke signal that Moriarty would see and believe: Sherlock Holmes, a week out of the hospital, has succumbed to the despair. He knew how to give the greatest impact to the shocking stories he was steadily disseminating into London’s underworld.

He texted Lestrade as his mania of deduction peaked, and made sure there was no doubt in the Detective Inspector’s mind as to the source of Sherlock’s sudden, violent fervour. Sherlock imperfectly hid the syringe when Donovan was dispatched to his flat with files he had requested. He let his hands tremble when Anderson, with the greatest reluctance, came to take the sorted stacks away again. 

As the days passed, in the mirror he saw himself shrink, flesh being consumed for fuel when the food had seemed fairly nauseous. Another log for the pyre. Something to help drive the rumours.

Lestrade phoned the flat after Anderson returned to Scotland Yard, his voice over the line weary and grey. 

“Sherlock, I can’t send anyone over there anymore.” A pause, and a heavy sigh. “Remember what I told you the last time.”

Lestrade’s rule. The reason Sherlock had gotten clean the first time, after he’d nearly killed someone trying to run down a miscreant. Sherlock couldn’t have access to the cases if he wasn’t sober. It was the one club Lestrade held over him, held and never used, never needed to. Until now. Dull triumph flared and died in his chest. Lestrade had abandoned him.

_I’m going to burn the heart right out of you._

Yes. Please.

He remembered the bright points – finding the thrill of discovery as he scrawled his conclusions onto paper. This crime was of passion, find the brother’s wife. This one was Moriarty’s, notice the unusual collection? This one a pathetic plea for attention, a copycat, ignore it. Notes he clipped to the files and sent off by post, now that Lestrade would no longer pick them up. He was arming Lestrade against Moriarty, giving him the weapons and armour he’d need to pick up once Sherlock had discarded them. 

He remembered the low points – The agony of waking up bereft of his chemicals, fever and weakness and nausea coming at him in waves. Of having to make calls, to dispense Mycroft’s money for what he truly needed, sending his indefatigable assistant to gather it for him. Anthea never commented when she delivered. Sometimes she helped him tighten the tourniquet and clean the injection site. It was not on Mycroft’s orders, but on her own initiative; his brother always did know how to pick people that would put Queen and country before their own conscience. And Queen and country needed Moriarty dead.

Mycroft refused to make an appearance. It occurred to him, in the emotional clarity that sometimes came when he’d run out of vials and before another had arrived, that even Mycroft did not want to see him burn. He didn’t want to watch Sherlock’s prolonged death. He did not want to intrude. Then another rush of cocaine would sweep through him, numbing feeling and enhancing thought. 

The calendar dropped pages like autumn leaves. And still there was no signal that Moriarty had been watching the blood burn itself right out of Sherlock’s body. No hint that Sherlock’s self-destruction had caught his eye. No inkling that Sherlock had sat in the dire silence of his flat, wanting to hear a familiar voice or see a beloved face.

Finally there was only one file left. The last file. The first once he’d ever gotten, the one Donovan and Anderson had pressed on him at the hospital. The one Lestrade had sent him with the uncompromising photographs of death. 

It was the equivalent of a blow to the head, enough to send his drug-addled brain reeling, fitful connections flaring and dying as he took in the sight of tiny, bloody numbers scrawled into the tiles on the bare edge of one photograph of John’s mangled body. Moriarty’s number, written in John’s blood, where only Sherlock would have noticed it.

In all the months of thought and agony, Sherlock had thought to learn, but never paused to mourn. 

Sherlock had never consciously questioned the fact that he could see and speak to John. This lack of curiosity would have surprised those who professed to know him. Logically John’s appearance after his death could be explained away as a product of Sherlock’s cracked skull, or as a result of the trauma of losing a close friend. The words “lucid hallucination” could be employed. Or perhaps a “vocal extrapolation of his guilty conscience, long-suppressed.” In that, Sherlock could easily explain away John’s recent disappearance as the introduction of cocaine into his system restarting old thought process, and hence disrupting the conditions that had brought John back from the dead, so to speak.

But he did not believe so. Logic couldn’t explain John telling him things he couldn’t possibly know. John had left, not because he was a coward, but because Sherlock had pushed him away just when they had been on the verge of something true: an instant of blessed normalcy when Sherlock could mourn for the loss of his friend and what might have been. He had chosen to try to hold back that final revelation with the last of his work.

And now it was done.

Sherlock could feel it now, no longer able to hold it back or drown it out with sensation or numb it to oblivion. It was _there_ , sudden as the sunrise, John’s smile in moments of relaxation, constant care with no hope of reciprocation, loyalty and devotion to the death, companionship in the face of Sherlock’s callousness, joint triumph, sparks to create new ideas, a completely intolerable loss that he _was not there_. It was erupting inside of him, his stomach on fire, pressure building in his head and throat, behind his eyes, burning with pain.

He flew apart, the scream erupting out of him with a full-throated sob, anger and frustration and guilt hitting like a storm of flung knives, ripping through every protection, leaving him open and gasping at the pain. His tears burned down his face, wet and vulnerable; his throat felt like it was ripping as animal howls of pain reverberated around the dim room.

Sherlock wrapped his arms around himself, trying to keep something in, to keep anything for himself, but it was too late. He spasmed, body shaking, as if his frame couldn’t expel his misery without moving. Sherlock felt everything: his eyes and face soaked and sticky with tears, his throat raw and painful from his sobs, his muscles aching from all the abuses he’d heaped on them for weeks. Time deserted him, and he only came back when he felt someone tugging him up on his knees, holding him through the pain.

Mrs. Hudson had tucked herself on the floor next to him with blithe disregard for her bad hip, and was holding him like a child, like his mother had never done. 

“John,” he whispered.

“I know dear. We miss him,” she said, her arms tightening.

“He’s gone.” Sherlock felt the truth of that statement for the first time.

“It’s not right, but there’s nothing to be done but remember him well.”

Sherlock looked up, and John was there, kneeling in front of him his expression grave and broken and beautiful.

“I do. He--.” Another spasm shook him, choking his throat, and Mrs. Hudson held him still, showing surprising strength for her age. John held out a hand, silently warning him to calm down. Sherlock remembered to breathe, his chest unclenching, and John moved closer. Sherlock closed his eyes, and for a moment swore he felt the phantom pressure of lips against his.

Sherlock opened his eyes and John was gone.

“Dear? Come on, let’s get you a nice hot bath. You look a fright.” 

Sherlock stood, holding out a hand to help her up, and then shook his head. “No, Mrs. Hudson, thank you.” He turned away from her and smiled. “I have something I need to do.”

She looked him up and down, eyes softening as she saw the determination in every line of him. “Oh, Sherlock…”

“Let’s be clear. I won’t come back--,” Sherlock began, an acidic bite to his tone to warn her not to trifle with him.

She stepped forward and patted him on the cheek. “You never did, dear.”

Another spasm wracked him, and Sherlock fled the flat before one of Mycroft’s flunkies could arrive to restrain him. 

He returned to the pool, still being rebuilt and thus deserted at this hour. He pressed his back to a tiled wall, willed himself still, and brought the gun into his lap. He stared at the firearm. It wasn’t John’s; that had been too damaged in the explosion, but it was identical, and fit his hand well. 

“John, I am going to kill Jim Moriarty.”

John turned to look at him from his position next to him, his face bloody and wounded.

“You’ll die, you idiot.”

“I didn’t expect to live through this, you realize.”

“I’m not that stupid. God, I’d shake you until your teeth rattled if I could. Why do such a damnfool move?” John demanded.

“ _You_ were willing to die to take him out.”

“I’m not you, you egomaniac twit! You could do so much more than me--.”

“Shut it! Your death was intolerable. I did not tolerate any part of it. If you were ‘worthy’ enough to sacrifice yourself for me, then I only hope I can be the same. All the cases, the worst cases Lestrade brought us were Moriarty’s. If he dies, they stop, because I spent the last year breaking him into as many pieces as you. He’s too certain of himself to have tolerated a protégé.”

“If he’s like you, you’re right. You both would have been murdered in your sleep if you had apprentices.”

“Contemplated it yourself, did you?” Sherlock asked, smirking slightly.

“So many times,” John admitted.

“Why not?”

“I assume you mean other than the fact that murder is wrong and it’s impossible to find a cheap flat alone in London?”

Sherlock nodded.

“You’re brilliant. And the way you play the violin…”

“I didn’t know you even listened to me.”

“You only played when I was trying to sleep. It’s hard to ignore that.”

“I love you, John. It’s necessary that you know,” Sherlock said softly, looking straight at him.

“I know. You think I stuck around just to get humiliated by you and to yell at you?”

“Is that was love is? Staying with someone you hate? All those tedious songs must be wrong.”

“No. It’s the thin and thick, for better or for worse.”

“Ah.” A world of understanding opened up before him.

“I love you too, Sherlock.”

Sherlock smiled at him, beginning to comprehend, truly. “It makes no sense.”

“And that’s the point.” John grimaced and fresh blood ran down his face. “It won’t be long now. Why tell me right now, Sherlock?”

“Because once Moriarty comes, I won’t have time. And this is the most important fact I’ve ever discovered.”

John nodded slowly, eyes closed in pain.

Sherlock pressed the speed dial on his phone, then tossed it on a shelf, the speaker open. Someone picked up. “I’m ready,” Sherlock said. There was a pause, and the phone disconnected.

“No witty remarks?” John asked.

“I have nothing to say to him.”

“What do you want to do, then?”

“Be here with you.”

John smiled through his pain and stood there until he couldn’t stand anymore, eyes on Sherlock, listening to what he had to say. And when Sherlock had to kneel on the tile floor to be near him, John kept watching and listening. 

When Sherlock heard Moriarty’s footsteps, as a distant, dim thing, he was ready. He didn’t need to match wits with his nemesis, struggle against boredom with the adrenaline rush of dangerous discovery, or question him on why he’d answered Sherlock’s call. He knew what he needed to do, and for once it was blessedly, blessedly simple.

With every word, Sherlock told John what he didn’t know he needed to. The red dots of snipers’ laser sights began to dance over his chest as Moriarty walked into the room. He saw Sherlock, thin, haggard, bruised, kneeling on the floor, whispering to someone unseen, a gun held limply in his lap. The world’s first, greatest, and only consulting detective completely ignored him.

Sherlock murmured that John was more than a sounding board, more than a living skull. That he had answered questions Sherlock didn’t realize he needed to ask, make Sherlock into someone different than he had been, and that person was far better in his own skin.

Moriarty smiled. Opened his mouth to deliver a cheerful hello. Sherlock’s bullet drilled into Moriarty head before he could even register the slight movement of Sherlock’s hand. 

John had died slowly this time, and Sherlock was able to find the few words he needed. He was able to say goodbye.

As Moriarty collapsed to the ground like a puppet bereft of a puppeteer, a dozen bullets slammed into Sherlock’s body, his blood splattering across the tiles. As he fell to the floor, skin pale and bloodless as marble, all Sherlock could see was John’s smile.


End file.
